Back on the horse after a vacation...

Chuck had a little experience trying to sneak unnoticed into rooms. Back at Stanford, he had taken a literature class his junior year to satisfy one of his core graduation requirements. Unfortunately, he had drawn the section in the 8:00 slot on Mondays and Wednesdays, so frequently a late night of studying or fraternity events or time spent with Jill left him standing outside the classroom, bleary-eyed from a lack of sleep, five to fifteen minutes after class had started.

This was a little different. Being caught here held harsher consequences than a glare from a perturbed professor.

Pulling the door slightly towards him to reduce the chance of the latch scraping, he rotated the knob carefully counterclockwise, being sure to turn it until he could turn it no more. The latch could catch on the jamb if he didn't, as he had once found out the hard way. He silently thanked Professor Hathaway and pushed the door slightly open.

The first thing he saw was Sarah, fiddling with the bonds securing her hands behind her seat. A small trickle of blood ran down her right wrist, her only reward for her efforts.

She turned to look at Casey and instead noticed the cracked door. Her eyes widened.

Chuck was startled by the range of naked emotions that paraded across her face. Anger, happiness, disbelief and relief all finally blended into something vaguely resembling pride. He wasn't sure what it all meant. It would need to wait.

He was about to make his move when Sarah's eyes shot him a warning. He stopped, realizing that she wanted him to wait. He crouched down and took a quick glimpse behind him. All was clear, so he turned back, patiently awaiting her signal.

A terse nod from Sarah finally indicated an opening. Chuck quickly slipped inside the room, terrified at how close the back of the female torturer was. He managed to close the door silently. It's just Professor Hathaway, it's just Professor Hathaway, he tried to convince himself. Unfortunately, he wasn't that gullible, especially when he spun just as she cocked her club to the side and slammed it into Cole's rib cage. The agent's breath came in violent wheezes.

Chuck froze at the viciousness of the attack; he quickly snapped himself out of it. Somehow he managed to slip under the table near Casey without being noticed. A wooden divider descended from the center of the table to the ground, giving Chuck the illusion of safety from the woman.

Casey shot his own look between his knees at Chuck. Now, what, idiot? he seemed to ask. Chuck produced a box cutter, and a barely tamed excitement lit up Casey's eyes.

The blade hovered over Casey's feet as Chuck waited for the next attack and its corresponding concealing noises. He didn't need to wait long. As Cole cried out in pain and panted for breath in the aftermath, Chuck sliced hard and severed the ties holding one of Casey's feet to the chair's wheeled base. Another whack from the club and Casey's other foot was loose. He was just starting to figure out how he was going to set Casey's hands free when the woman spiked the dowel off the table, nearly startling Chuck enough to get him to bang his head on the underside of the table. The dowel bounced twice more on the wood before landing on the floor over by the window.

"Mr. Carmichael," she said in a frustrated voice as her slow footsteps carried her back towards her other equipment. Chuck heard what sounded like the scraping of plastic on the wood table. "I sincerely wish I had the time to break you properly, but time is running short. So, we'll need to try something different. In this syringe is a special little cocktail that I whipped up myself. I don't know exactly how potent it is, but it should cause an extraordinarily painful death in somewhere between, say, twenty seconds and twenty minutes, depending on how much I give you. Now I'll start by injecting just a little, after which the pain will grow, and grow, and grow some more. If you answer the questions I ask, I'll inject the rest and reward you with a quick death. If not…"

Chuck's heart stopped. He hadn't come this far just to have Cole die now.

He ignored the warning looks by Sarah and Casey as he scooted out from under the table, staying low. The woman heard Chuck's clothes catch on the carpet. She stopped advancing on Cole and spun around. "What was that?" she demanded.

Chuck reached up to put the box cutter in Casey's hands, blade pointed towards the rope. With the torturer's attention on him and Sarah, Casey couldn't afford to start working his bonds yet; he settled for finding the rope with the edge of the blade and biding his time.

Chuck reached into his shirt pocket and yanked out his gun and a particular piece of ammo. He took a glance over at Sarah, who was doing her best to ignore Chuck while the woman scanned the room. Her poker face shifted to shock as Chuck stood up.

So did the expression of the woman standing next to Cole, the syringe in her hand dangerously close to Cole. She started moving the tip towards Cole's neck.

"I don't think we'll be doing that," hesaid quietly, warningly.

"And why is that?" she responded, suddenly seeming unperturbed by Chuck's appearance. Seeing no reason to stop, she put the tip of the syringe on Cole's neck and grabbed the back of the collar to keep him still.

"You see this?" Chuck held up the nearly perfectly straight paper clip, the last inch of the end he showed to her coated in black.

She nodded.

He slipped the metal into his gun and took aim. "This has been treated with a little home brew of my own. Unlike yours, I happen to know exactly what it will do." He loaded it into the gun and cocked it back, slowly sidestepping behind Sarah. "One scratch of this and you may not die a painful death, but be assured, it will be quick."

As his words sunk in, he slowly continued his sideways walk across the room, passing around the end of the table while keeping the weapon trained on the woman.

Her eyes narrowed. "You're lying."

"Try me. One scratch and you're done."

"If you were any kind of trained assassin, you wouldn't have a weapon made of binder clips and rubber bands."

"Sometimes we need to improvise."

"What, you brought toxins but you didn't bring a gun?"

"I'd be happy to pull the vial out of my pocket and show you, but I think you understand why I can't do that."

"Because you don't have one."

Chuck felt himself begin to sweat. The two were in a standoff, and all it would take was one scream to do them in. Her smile told him that she knew the truth.

He had two choices. The first was to surrender outright, in which case Fulcrum would have four prisoners, including the Intersect. The second was to bluff. He had bluffed once before, but never with somebody else's life.

There was a first time for everything.

"Go ahead." Chuck shrugged. "Stick the syringe in his neck, and then I'll have no reason not to take you down. One-for-one with two agents freed; that seems like an acceptable trade to me."

A hunched-over Cole turned his head, the wryness in his bright eyes standing out amidst the tanned skin, the dark stubble and the caked-on sweat and blood. Still, there was no denying the respect that Cole had for Chuck in that moment. Chuck's confidence grew.

The slightest trace of doubt crept into the woman's face. Licking her lips, she readjusted her grip on the syringe and Cole's collar with a determined expression.

Thwack!

Her eyes glazed over. She knees gave and she collapsed to the ground, the syringe rolling out of her hand and across the floor.

Behind her prone body stood Casey, holding her own discarded club, a satisfied look on his face.

After turning his head to see what had happened, Cole let out a grateful sigh. "Thank you. I've wanted to do that for half an hour now."

Chuck let his weapon drop with a relieved sigh. A sense of jubilation surged through his veins. It had worked! Somehow, in some way, he had figured out how to rescue his teammates ... with no help from another agent. With no help from the Intersect.

The slam of metal on wood jolted him from his internal celebration. Casey had slammed the box cutter onto the table, reminding him that their work wasn't done yet.

"Get them loose," Casey ordered Chuck as he walked over to the window. He parted the blinds to keep watch.

Chuck grabbed the box cutter and quickly went to work on the MI6 agent's bonds.

The man was slightly delirious with pain, and his eyes had heavy lids. "I didn't know you knew anything about poison," he said in a tired voice.

"I don't," Chuck said a bit sheepishly. "It's toner ink. However, if seven years of MacGyver taught me anything, it's that there isn't a problem that can't be solved with a paper clip."

Cole shook his head. "You really should get a gun."

"Tell my partners that."

After the last of the bonds came free, Chuck left Cole gratefully rubbing at his chafed skin and rushed across the room to kneel down next to Sarah's chair so he could free her. She looked down at him with an expression that was only mostly blank; he couldn't understand what little seeped through her defenses.

"You shouldn't have come," she said quietly.

"I couldn't let my team down. I am part of the team, aren't I?"

Her feet freed, he headed around behind the chair to cut the rope around her wrists.

She stared into space as he freed his hands; the work was a bit slower to avoid any more cuts into her skin.

"You really did," she said, a small note of wonder coloring her voice.

"Did what?"

"You came for the team."

"That's right. Why does that matter?"

Her hands came free. She pivoted in the chair to look at him, her eyes full of meaning he couldn't grasp. She never got to answer the question.

"Carmichael," Casey barked. "Search Rosa Klebb and see if she has anything useful. Barker, check her kit to see if there's anything we can use to get out of here. Walker, gather up what's left of the rope and tie her up."

Once more, the mystery that was Sarah Walker would need to wait. There was work to do.

Chuck went across the room, not quite sure how to search the woman. Was he supposed to check her bra? Her panties? Run his hands under her clothes, across her skin?

Barker noticed his hesitance as he sorted through the case of torture implements. "Carmichael," he said quietly with a sidelong glance, "I tend to believe she lost her right to any modesty about ten shots to my ribs ago."

A bit of a flush came to Chuck's skin. "Fair point." Chuck knelt down and treated her, as much as he could, like a CPR dummy. The flush only increased when he was forced to finish the search with Sarah in close proximity. As she bound the woman's hands tightly behind her back, Chuck was rewarded with a series of awkward moments, more than one amused smirk from Sarah, but most importantly, a small pistol from a holster strapped to her thigh under her black skirt.

Sarah finished binding the woman and shoved her under the back of the table. The three gathered to see what weapons they had found. There wasn't much of use. Aside from the pistol, the club, and the box cutter, everything else that they had was pretty much useless for an attack or an escape.

Casey let out a long sigh before scanning the room a last time. "Bartowski, you just wearing that fanny pack as a fashion statement, or did you actually bring anything besides a sling shot and a bad poker face?"

Chuck had forgotten the pack, and was torn between embarrassment and indignation. After the incident on the floor, he deliberately chose the latter. He was about done with being embarrassed; after all, he had gotten them all free. "Actually..." he said suggestively as he pulled off the pack.

He started pulling items from the pack and carefully setting them on the table so as not to make much noise.

Silence filled the room as the team surveyed the items added to their inventory. Cole and Sarah's faces conveyed what Casey had no reservations about saying.

"You're kidding me, right?"